Ask Lemmy

Well it started when I was born and my mom named me Bill…

They were out of Bort usernames.

I very briefly hosted my own Lemmy instance at endofti.me. The username seemed appropriate there. Just kept it when I moved instances.

Folded space.

It's embarrassing. I'm not telling.

I was tickled pink about this prehistoric fish that went viral a little while back and I thought I would adopt its name.

Just made that shit up. I was trying to think of something stupid that wouldn't identify me in any personal way, and this one made me chuckle

I got it from a random generator after I had to change my Minecraft username when I was a kid. Been using it ever since.

In memory of the Apollo app.

Shit!

I got bored of winning all these fuckin accolades for porn.

Then the world started runnin outta french fries and burrito coverins, people starvin and shit.

Enough was enough!

President Camacho 2024!

I have plans to find a better one.

It's like when kids make up a ridiculous nickname for you in grade school, but it sticks and you end up using it on your business cards.

First word that came to mind when I was like 13 followed by an arbitrary number and letter. It just means ball or sphere in German. I took up naming things by simple shapes by then so I guess there must be something I like about it.

Iain M. Banks' "Culture" series. RIP

Mine is just a combination of a shortened nickname from just out of high school (Donkey) and my D.O.B. Not secure, don't care... I got sick of writing out my original when logging in as it was too long. Donkey_Snickers That was back when the tagline for the Snickers chocolate bar advertisements was "Really satisfies"... I had a bit of an ego regarding my sexual prowess 20 something years ago...

At the time, I was playing a lot of Diablo.

Sleeping pills and a misspelled person. It was my pirated minecraft username first.

A fairy name generator.

I had a boss back in the day that I had a really good rapport with, and he would jokingly call me Shrek because I was almost a foot taller than he was. I also worked in a lot of restaurants in my late teens to early twenties and found a love for cooking that has never really gone away.

Abbreviation of my real name yields "NW". I decided to add wind to make it a Hong Kong slang.

It's my lizard's name

Was my reddit username for ten years. When I joined reddit it was through the swimming sub, looking for info on waterproof MP3 players so I could swim laps while listening to AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Slayer, etc etc. I'm a bogan that swim laps pretty much every day.... therefore waterbogan

I appreciate numbers.

For reasons I no longer remember, about 14 years ago I stumbled across The Endless Forest. I poked around on the web page a bit, decided it was interesting but not interesting enough to actually install, and moved on. A short while later I saw something on Reddit that I felt like posting a comment on, and so I created an account and this was the first username that popped to mind.

Quite some time later I got into modding a game called Minetest, and a very common element in its API is the "facedir" of a node - short for facing direction. I had a lot of people assume I'd drawn my name from that, but it was sheer coincidence.

Mistakes.
I created a test account on SDF pubnix. Since it was a test account, I didn't use my usual username, but just user224. Then some good user (xiled) decided to verify my account. Thus I had to stick with it.
Then later on Twitter I've seen SDF announce their Lemmy instance. Not knowing what Lemmy is, I've used the same username as on SDF pubnix, which was an accident.
I can't change it either, and this account has some history already. Just building up on mistakes. Just like when I find a "temporary" solution to something.

It was my username on my porn account on Reddit. I derived it from my not porn account that I also used for other things and people IRL knew. I ended up using this one way more so kept it when Reddit banned me and I came over here.

I think mine is kinda obvious but in case it isn't, it's "GNU" in the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet. I got it because I like aviation and Linux... and also because I'm too autistic to get a more normal one

I like Marvin from hhgttg. Also, I have sleep issues.

I'll let you guess the second half 👍

The first half is actually short for Indigo.

Back in the day my old internet alias was Indigo Michigan. I eventually dropped the Michigan when I became a Brony. "Indigo Brony" didn't really sound great, so I shortened it.

I read Les liaisons dangeureuses my second year in France and loved it. Misspellt de Valmonts name though :-)

The upside of the misspelling was that the name was always free on any forum up til not that long ago where bots started to recycle existing usernames all over the place.

I made it up myself. I came up with the phrase decades ago, and recently decided it was time for a new online moniker since a number of people were able to deduce my real identity based on my old one I'd used for a couple decades prior.

One of my favourite characters from a book.